Ownership And High-growth Firms

Empirical studies demonstrate that most net job-growth originates from a small number of High-Growth Firms (HGFs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether firm ownership - family, or private non-family - matters for being a HGF, using data covering all firms in Sweden during 1993-2006. Firm growth is measured in terms of absolute employment growth, relative employment growth and as a combination of absolute and relative employment growth (the so-called Birch-index). The authors find that family ownership decreases the probability of exhibiting high growth. Changing ownership from family to private non-family increases the probability of being a HGF, whereas a change from private non-family to family ownership decreases the probability of being a HGF.